Linguistics has a long and storied history…that mostly consists of people in other fields doing language-y stuff. But then Chomsky appeared! Because Chomsky. See the slides or read the notes below for details. Also, check out these links:
Finding patterns in language: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Recurrent neural nets are weirdly and awesomely effective: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
History of linguistics
Linguistics spawned from philosophy (like possibly everything). People thought about language and said wrong stuff and researched stuff. Then this guy named Chompsky came along and did a ton of stuff and was a jerk. But that’s going out of order.
Panini
· Sanskrit grammar
· Made 3959 rules of morphology, syntax, and semantics
· Lexical lists and algorithms
· Phonemes, morphemes, roots
Roger Bacon
· Rumored to be a wizard with a magical bronze head
· Believed that grammar was basically the same in all languages
· Wrote about Aristotelian logic
· Was a frier friar
Francis Bacon
· Father of empiricism
· Died while studying the preservation of meat
Gottlob Frege
· Wrote “Sense and Reference” (very important semantic text)
· Founded truth conditional semantics
· Principle of compositionality (allowed people to study language more closely)
· Created function-argument structure that represented words as functions
o Ex. IsRed(chair) = The chair is red
· Made first formal language
Bertrand Russel
· Theory of descriptions
· Broke set theory
Richard Montague
· Tried to use math to describe
· Created Montague grammar to try to translate natural language into formal language
Willard Van Oran Quine
· Not that important
· Theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning
· Naturalism
Ferdinand de Saussure
· Language is a social phenomenon
· Langue vs. Parole
o Langue – the language
o Parole – your specific language
· Founder of Structuralism
o Put elements of language into boxes
· His ideas were published after he died and contributed a lot
Leonard Bloomfield
· Heavy science emphasis
o Didn’t like semantics because you can’t know what people are thinking
· Behaviorist
· Structural linguistics
o Tried to classify linguistics
Noam Chomsky
· Really important
· Kind of mean
· Created the ideas:
o Generative grammar
§ We can generate all the valid sentences in a language
o Universal grammar
o Poverty of stimulus
§ How can children learn language when they don’t have enough data?
o Cognitive science
o Deep structure
· Principles and parameters
Yehoushua Bar-Hill
· First full time machine translation researcher
· Studied under frankael
The linguistic wars: Deep structure – relating to syntax or semantics?
Daniel Everett
· Travelled to Brazil
· Their language, Piraha, appeared to lack recursion